“Six weeks in spring training aren’t going to teach you how to bunt at the major league level, how to move guys over. It’s different than college. These guys are faster. You’ve got to turn and make that throw to second quicker. You’ve got to learn to hold runners a lot more and learn how to pitch with the ability of the guys on base. That’s where the pressure gets turned up on you.”

At the same time, Prior is yet to turn 30, so he still recalls vividly what things look like through the eyes of a phenom who’s been told for more than a year that he could pitch in the majors now. As in, yesterday.

“You’re pretty eager,” said Prior, who’s remained a San Diego resident. “If you’d asked me these questions eight years ago, I wouldn’t have had the same responses, wouldn’t have had the perspective. If you’d asked me back then about the day I got sent down from my first spring training — a Sunday morning going into the last week of camp — I was ticked. In retrospect, it was good for me.”

Noting that his minor league experience “was completely different from 99 percent of everybody else’s,” Prior said it was “short and sweet.” Clearly ready for the big time, Prior was an immediate smash with the Cubs, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates in his May 22 debut and becoming the first NL pitcher since Fernando Valenzuela to record double-digit strikeouts in three of his first five starts. Only a year later, Prior had won 18 games and pitched the Cubs to within five outs of the World Series, something they hadn’t experienced since 1945 and hadn’t won since 1908.

Because the Nationals have been wretched since their arrival from Montreal, the wonder was why Washington would hurry Strasburg to the majors, except that he could fill alot of those empty seats in a hurry. Frankly, the fact that the Nats have a winning record at this point is surprising, although it’s unclear whether that would put them in more or less of a rush to summon Strasburg.

“The one thing I might say now, so many years later, is that maybe I should have spent two months or three months in the minor leagues,” Prior said. “It’s not from a competitive standpoint. (Strasburg’s) going to dominate physically, going to go out and overpower these guys. It’s just learning yourself, learning how to pitch every five days and handling the days in between. It’s not college anymore. It’s not pitching every Friday night and having maybe a couple classes earlier in the day.

“My second start, we got into Pittsburgh something like 4 in the morning. It’s the travel, being in different ballparks, facing different types of teams. Those are the things you pick up in the minor leagues. You learn how to go out and pitch when you’re not feeling that well, maybe coming off a 12-hour bus ride and pitching that way.

“In college, every seventh day, you felt like a million bucks. After about 15 starts in the big leagues, you don’t feel like a million bucks. You go through dead spots, three games where you can’t figure out which way is second base and which way is home plate.”